Witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment Europe

Edited by:
Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt

This book looks at aspects of the continuation of witchcraft and magic in Europe from the last of the secular and ecclesiastical trials during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through to the nineteenth century. It provides a brief outline of witch trials in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Finland. By the second half of the seventeenth century, as the witch trials reached their climax in Sweden, belief in the interventionist powers of the Devil had become a major preoccupation of the educated classes. Having acknowledged the slight possibility of real possession by the Devil, Benito Feijoo threw himself wholeheartedly into his real objective: to expose the falseness of the majority of the possessed. The book is concerned with accusations of magic, which were formalised as denunciations heard by the Inquisition of the Archdiocese of Capua, a city twelve miles north of Naples, during the first half of the eighteenth century. One aspect of the study of witchcraft and magic, which has not yet been absorbed into the main stream of literature on the subject, is the archaeological record of the subject. As a part of the increasing interest in 'popular' culture, historians have become more conscious of the presence of witchcraft after the witch trials. The aftermath of the major witch trials in Dalarna, Sweden, demonstrates how the authorities began the awkward process of divorcing themselves from popular concerns and beliefs regarding witchcraft.

Book

Publication History:

Magic, witchcraft and Church in early eighteenth-century Capua

Augusto Ferraiuolo

2
Beyond the witch trials
Magic, witchcraft and Church in Capua
Pro exoneratione sua propria coscientia:
magic, witchcraft and Church in early
eighteenth-century Capua
Augusto Ferraiuolo
The following discussion is concerned with accusations of magic, which were
formalised as denunciations heard by the Inquisition of the Archdiocese of
Capua, a city twelve miles north of Naples, during the first half of the
eighteenth century. What the following discussion will not be doing is providing a detailed socio-cultural exploration of the magical practices and the